On the day of the Westminster attack that left 6 dead, a Twitter troll shared an image of a Muslim woman on the phone, wrongly claiming she was ignoring the victims on the bridge: Image: screengrab/twitter/@southlonestarBoth the photographer and the woman in the image debunked @SouthLoneStar's account of the scene, saying it was taken out of context: Please circulate: Statement from the Muslim woman photographed on Westminster Bridge during #WestminsterAttack (via @TellMamaUK) pic.twitter.com/2sHFb56lEu — TellMAMAUK (@TellMamaUK) March 24, 2017 Nonetheless, the tweet got over 1,800 likes and 1,600 retweets, picked up by alt-right personalities and white nationalists like Richard Spencer: Walk on by... pic.twitter.com/8kCHYoNTIh — Richard ?????? Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) March 22, 2017 Now, it turns out that this account that spews hatred and anti-Muslim sentiment to its 16,000+ followers is a Russian bot, which has since been closed by Twitter, according to
Wired. The report looks at a cache of posts from 2016 collected by New Knowledge, an American security startup, and reveals a network of Russian bots posting about "the Brexit vote, pictures of London Mayor Sadiq Kahn, anti-Muslim language around European terror attacks and racial slurs against refugees." In June 2016, @SouthLoneStar, which claimed to be a "Proud TEXAN and AMERICAN patriot", tweeted about Brexit: "I hope UK after #BrexitVote will start to clean their land from muslim invasion!" Image: Screengrab/twitter/@southlonestarThe account also appears in the Russian congressional investigation released by U.S. democrats. WATCH: Flying taxis could be here by 2020 thanks to Uber